“My father almost beat me to death with it once. Sweetest thing he ever did for me.”

She didn’t like that answer, and she didn’t like me. To be fair, I didn’t need to be so sour about it. It was an innocent question. Near as I can tell, she’s even an innocent girl. Which is why I agreed to help her. That was about nine hours ago, way back in my office. What a difference nine hours can make.

Once again, a supernatural web-series drags me wearily from blog retirement. Once again, it’s Canadian, and once again it’s very damn interesting. In this case, however, we’re going to need a few disclaimers:

Disclaimer the first: I am varying degrees of Twitter-friendly with some of the creatives involved; I claim no objectivity, so perhaps I will be too kind.

Disclaimer the second: I have a longstanding and deep-seated distaste, distrust, and dislike for shrinks; I claim no objectivity, so perhaps I will be too cruel.

Banshee ended a truly special four year run tonight, and the TV world’s a bit less exciting without another season of this twisted, violent, sentimental, brutal, romantic, tragic, hilarious, vicious, thoughtful masterpiece to look forward to. I could have thrown another fifty adjectives into that sentence and still been right. Banshee was all those things, even in the face of contradiction. Especially in the face of contradiction. It was the greatest mindless action show on television. It was the most subtle, thoughtful, character driven meditation on television. It was The Ballad of Sheriff Punch. It was Identity. It was whatever it wanted to be, and it was excellent.

And now it’s over. I wrote about it two weeks ago, meant to write about it more since, and will doubtless write more about it in the weeks to come. There’s much to say not only about the show as a whole, the final season, and the beautifully damaged and bizarre citizenry of that strange little town, but for tonight I’m just going to ride the emotional buzz of saying goodbye, and spit out bullet points about the finale as they come to me.

So, I watched Sudden Master, but I’m not sure whether or not you should. I know, usually the point of a review is to help people figure that out, but this is such a weird case, because whether or not you should watch Sudden Master has a lot to do with whether or not there’s going to be any more Sudden Master.

Sudden Master’s first season runs about thirty minutes long, and not coincidentally, feels a lot more like the shaky-but-promising pilot of a show that will eventually be really good than it does like a complete story. Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly entertaining, and there’s some very real potential there, but as a stand-alone product I’m not sure there’s enough there to recommend it.

Trying something new here, as I write real reviews, but use fake titles to protect against any pre-existing bias there may be. Let's see how it goes. After the jump, you can check out my reviews of The Ballad of Sheriff Punch and Identity.